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Well, maybe this guy.

 

FORT LAUDERDALE – A $3 million waterfront house with amenities like a home theater won’t be raffled off after all.

The homeowner, Miles Brannan, was trying to unload it through the raffle drawing. The plan was for him to pay off the nearly $2 million he still owes on the house, give a chunk of the proceeds to charity, and still have enough left over to buy his family a condo.
Brannan … said last week that too few tickets had been sold — a mere 63,000 to 65,000, way less than the hoped-for 300,000. That’s a common problem with such raffles, consumer affairs officials say.

Eventually the charity organizing the raffle, The Mission of St. Francis, decided to turn the drawing for a fancy house into a drawing for a pot of cash: $800,000, to be split 50/50 between the raffle winner and the charity.

“You can’t please everybody,” Labarga said. “What we’re trying to do right now is do the right thing.”

Brannan, an investor, bought the house four years ago for $2.35 million and said because of the economic downturn, he is struggling to maintain it.

Now he’s stuck with it. “I have no idea what we’re going to do next,” he said Monday. “I just don’t know.”

Labarga said the charity started selling raffle tickets for $10 apiece. When sales slowed, to raise more money, the ticket price was raised to $30. But only about 20,000 buyers came forward — at least one from as far away as London — to buy between 63,000 and 65,000 tickets.

On Saturday the charity sent out an e-mail about extending the drawing to March. But when ticket holders protested that they didn’t want to wait, the idea was scrapped in favor of the 50/50 split, Labarga said.

“We said since the numbers were not there, let’s go to the 50/50 and get it over with,” Labarga said. “A lot of people are saying will you do a new raffle? We want the house and we want it re-raffled. People are funny.”

State law prohibits nonprofit groups from canceling a drawing or making ticket sales a condition of a giveaway. Violators could face misdemeanor charges, but that’s unlikely to happen in this case. Fort Lauderdale Sgt. Frank Sousa said Monday that no complaints have been filed over the Coral Ridge Country Club house raffle.

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